


Figuring things out on the Front End

by BlackCheckerRed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean POV, M/M, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 04:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCheckerRed/pseuds/BlackCheckerRed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean gets it, he really does, some things you just relentlessly try to become, because the thing you are on the inside could screw everybody up and some people, you just don't risk</p>
            </blockquote>





	Figuring things out on the Front End

He hates that he wants.

That through all the bullshit they’ve been through, all the greater destiny shit that various mythological gods have tasked them with, that he still can’t grasp the want he has for Sam and cut it out of himself.

Through the perceived betrayals that he imagines his brother has perpetrated on him, though he rationally realizes that most of that had simply been a young man trying to establish his own sense of identity, his own sense of who ‘Sam’, should be. It still feels like betrayal. Dean recognizes, understands even, that whatever the motivating factors, that its all water under the bridge at this stage in the game, he’d still give his right arm to not constantly want Sam. Dean’s learned to live with it, to accept it as this …thing, that won’t ever go away. So he’s learned to work around it.

Dean figures that he’s gotten damn good at it, not like the days before Sam went off to college and more often than not Dean would find himself staring, hell, goddamn gazing at Sam. Intensely enough that their dad started working him harder, more drills, more hunts and Dean was mortified enough to become even more circumspect. Dean rarely looked at his brother directly after that.

And not like the days when Sam first came back on the road and Dean had to learn not to look at his little brother all over again. The early days when he would sometimes slip up, not far, not anything grotesque or ridiculous, just sometimes, just every once in awhile. Dean would make stupid little slips that he attributes to his own youth and desire.

Sam bursting out of the shower, wet and perfect, sluicing the water out of his eyes and fumbling with awkward grace in the rushed response to help Dean, responding to the urgency in Dean’s voice. Dean had turned away so quickly that he’d almost tripped and fallen so that Sam wouldn’t see what Dean knew was the poleaxed expression stamped across his features.

Sam didn’t need to see that.

Besides, Dean had actually enacted the game plan of putting itching powder in his brother’s shorts with the purity of maliciously fraternal glee. Dean had been laughingly pleased, initially, but had cursed himself after watching Sam vigorously ‘handling’ himself to relieve his discomfort for the next twenty-four hours. Dean never repeated that particular prank, ever again.

There had also been his over eager enthusiasm that had led him to push his own essence into Sam when they had been working a case that required them both to be incorporeal. Sam’s disgusted face and tense tone when he’d told Dean to “Get out of me” had left Dean with a dissatisfied smirk and a face saving insult. Didn’t mean that Dean hadn’t kicked himself after the case was nominally solved, thinking of how he’d been critically unable to stop himself from ‘doing’ things to Sam, things that he had no right to do but felt that he ‘needed’ to do. So, yeah, Dean felt that he was an old pro at not slipping up when it came to his little brother.

It also didn’t stop him from realizing his own obsessive compulsion and trying to be realistic about it. When Sam disappeared after Dean had broken his leg and they were holed up while he was healing, it certainly occurred to Dean that sawing off his cast with a fuckin’ handy tool to go after Sam could be considered … emotionally unhealthy, it also hadn’t stopped him. Sure, Sam left a note, sure Bobby had tried that unique form of counsel that encouraged Dean to consider the ‘sanity’ of his actions, which generally worked when Dean was considering every other situation that wasn’t ‘situation Sam’.

Dean justified Amy’s death with the only facts that counted, that Amy was exactly what she was, an unnatural killer who would do what she absolutely had to do. Amy killed only because it was absolutely necessary and Dean could commiserate, could understand and would (and had) done the exact same thing, if his family had their lives on the line. Dean never admitted to himself that the reason that might have prompted his driving a blade into the Kitsune was because she had a part of Sam that he’d never been privy to. Sam had never told him, and Dean never admitted that he might’ve even considered letting her live, if she hadn’t been a surprise, a part of Sam’s existence that he’d kept secret even from Dean.

Dean thought about the logic of his reasons and knew that they were plausible and right and not the strange, whispering secrets underneath his own secrets.

That Sam’s mouth was his and even if he couldn’t control that strangely disconcerting slash of bitchy imperfection, then he at least demanded the right to know what it was doing. Dean never thought about what life would be like if Jessica Moore had lived. He shied away from thoughts of what he might have done or become, so it never crossed his mind.

Ever.

No matter the Djinn that had rubbed his face into the fact that Dean would slip up and screw over their collective worlds if he didn’t have Sam in his hip pocket. Dean never thought about the fact that in his perfect, Djinn induced world, his little brother threw a spanner in the works that made absolutely certain that Dean couldn’t be without him. Dean forgot that it was his own brain that roped Sam in close except… Except that wasn’t close enough.

Dean occasionally thought of Cassie, his first (second?) love and how she had felt like a piece of himself he hadn’t known was missing until he met her. How his feelings for Cassie had been every clichéd piece of romantic bullshit that he hadn’t ever believed in but that it didn’t make them any less true, or powerful.

He thought about how Cassie was so singularly herself, sweet and so quietly, utterly certain of her own worth. Dean thought about Cassie’s generous strength and savage intelligence and how she had ‘chosen’ not to save him, in even the smallest of ways. Dean both admired and hated her for that.

So Dean had predominantly made peace with the level of fucked up that he was.

Dean knew that he was a good person, a hero even. Some people diddled kids, beat their wives, cheated the elderly out of lifetime’s worth of hard worked pensions. People abused retards or left babies in garbage cans, governments massacred their own citizens, people drowned kittens or starved puppies. Dean, though, he rid the world of evil, he kept people safe.

Dean knew that he wasn’t evil simply because he was in love with someone. Someone that he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in love with, but it was love nonetheless. Not just bodies, not just sex and release but the thing that lives inside of him and grabs onto the thing that lives inside his brother so that they can hang on tight and maybe turn out all right in the end.

Dead to soon in far flung, bloody chunks of what they used to be, but for the most part, yeah, all right. Dean knew that it could’ve only been love that made him sacrifice meals when he was younger, or feel whole hearted approval when little Sammy got hugs when dad came home from a hunt and Dean didn’t. Dean knew that it was love that lingered in him when his heart broke and Sam left Dean with a drunken, heartbroken father on a moonless night and a gravel road.

Dean knew it was love that let him drag Sam away from Jessica’s delicate and flame enshrouded form pinned to a ceiling. Dean also knew that Sam Loved. Dean. Exactly. The. Same. Way. To Sam’s everlasting and entirely unacknowledged shame. Still, Dean wished with everything they both had, that he didn’t still feel that ugly, physical want. Dean knew that it would’ve been a perfect love, the way close brothers are supposed to love each other, except for that fucking ….want.


End file.
